If you thought picking what films to see amongst the more than 300 options at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival was hard, imagine picking the one that will kick off the entire festival Thursday night.

Add the pressure from fans and critics who have criticized recent opening galas in the past for being either too Canadian (2008’s Passchendaele, 2010’s Score: A Hockey Musical) or not Canadian enough (2009’s Creation, 2011’s U2 documentary From the Sky Down), and the choice seems almost impossible.

This year, TIFF programmers have opted for the latter option and gone with Looper, an ambitious sci-fi film from a young-yet-acclaimed writer/director (Rian Johnson) and featuring an A-list cast of actors both well-established (Bruce Willis, Jeff Daniels) and steadily rising (Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Emily Blunt).

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It’s also the third non-Canadian opener in four years, further putting to rest the idea that the opening slot is reserved for homegrown fare. Festival artistic director Cameron Bailey thinks its mix of big-budget action and indie smarts will also win over even the most patriotic critics.

“When we saw Looper, ‘opening prospect’ was not the first possibility that came into my mind,” he says. “But the more I thought about it, the more I thought that this would be a very cool idea. Not only would it work with a huge segment of our audience, but it’s all part of an attempt to give us more choices and open up the field so we have a wider array of films to choose from.”

Bailey says it’s a “very particular kind of slot” that the opening film needs to fit, but of all the things the festival look for, scale is at the top of the list.

“We’re showing it to about 3,500 people that night so it has to have a good red carpet because that’s a part of opening night — it sets the tone of the festival,” he says, a lesson he learned last year when Bono and The Edge walked the carpet with director Davis Guggenheim for From the Sky Down.

“That was a fairly modest film in terms of the story it was trying to tell, but it had the biggest rock ’n’ roll band in the world in it, so it had that in terms of the scale,” Bailey says.

Other aspects TIFF considers when looking for potential opening night films are that they have to be a world premiere (“If they want the film to go to Cannes or Venice then it’s not an option for us,” Bailey says), and it helps if they already have U.S. distribution.

“It’s not essential, but it helps if it’s tied to a release date,” says Bailey, adding that Looper is set for wide release Sept 28. “If you’re coming in and the film is for sale you don’t know who is going to be distributing it in the U.S. yet, it’s not as attractive a proposition.”

This year, Bailey says there were no Canadian films that fulfilled all of these requirements (of the 20 galas, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children and Ruba Nadda’s Inescapable are the only Canadian ones), making Looper the best choice.

Kay Armatage, a film professor at the University of Toronto and TIFF programmer from 1982 to 2004, says there was a time when the festival couldn’t hope to secure a big Hollywood picture such as Looper, so in a way the move is a sure sign of TIFF’s growing stature.

“When they first started booking major U.S. movies, it really put the festival on the map, making TIFF a destination for critics and programmers,” she says. “Nowadays, TIFF gets what it wants. It’s a major, major film festival in the world — it goes Cannes, Venice, Toronto.”

That said, she thinks part of the role of a film festival is to put as large a spotlight on homegrown talent as possible.

“Why else would the film festival get funding from Telefilm or Heritage Canada?” she asks, adding that the obvious choice for her would have been Midnight’s Children by Mehta, whose 2005 film Water received the opening gala treatment. “It looks like an instant classic, it’s going to be timeless and is from a Canadian director.”

But both Mehta and the film’s producer David Hamilton say they preferred the Sunday evening slot to the Thursday opener because, as Hamilton puts it, “Everybody’s there. One of the problems with opening night is not everyone has arrived yet.”

Which highlights the problem with opening with a Canadian film for the past 35 years, minus the few recent exceptions. Over the years, international press and industry players have come to see it as a locals-only night.

“They said, ‘This is Canada’s night, we’ll stay home and come on Friday or Saturday,’ ” Bailey says. “I wanted to send a very strong signal that our festival starts on a Thursday, and I think Looper will help to do that. Eventually, opening night will become a more attractive proposition for films, and I look forward to when they’re banging down our doors trying to get the position.”

So far it’s been working, he says, and while Bailey doesn’t have hard figures on the international guests who will be coming for the opening gala, “we did get emails and calls after we announced it that said, ‘Great choice, now I need to change my plans and get there earlier so that I’m ready for opening night.’ And that’s gratifying.”

Another sure sign of the growing scale of TIFF’s opening night is the opening party, usually held at the far-flung Liberty Grand in Exhibition Place but which will be moved this year to the more central Maple Leaf Square in front of the Air Canada Centre.

The estimated guest list of 3,000 is a similar number to last year’s party, but the new location will also accommodate regular moviegoers who want to watch the star power walk the red carpet.

“Any filmmaker that’s in town on opening night that has a connection with the film or previously worked with any of the stars is likely to pop in,” says Barbara Hershenhorn, president of Party Barbara Co., the opening party organizer.

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